


but what to call you, my love

by roguerey



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Fix-It, M/M, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim (2013), Post-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-29 00:08:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14460792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roguerey/pseuds/roguerey
Summary: Newton is a pen pal. That’s how it all begins.





	but what to call you, my love

**Newton is a pen pal.**

That’s how it all begins. With a handwritten letter full of run-on sentences and too many exclamation points scrawled in handwriting so messy and  frantic that Hermann can almost feel the excitement radiating off the page. And then one letter turns into a dozen letters, then into a hundred letters, and then too many to count. Hermann tries not to feel guilty about the fact that all the chaos and the potential apocalypse are what have led to him having his first true friend in...possibly his entire life. He also tries not to feel guilty about the amount of time he spends wondering what things might be like if Newton lived closer rather than in America, and instead of letters they could have these discussions over tea, and possibly tour a museum together. 

 

**Newton is a childish, unorthodox, narcissistic, overzealous** **_biologist._ **

Hermann says as much to his face, the first time they meet in person. Perhaps that had been a bit harsh, but  _ Hermann _ wasn’t the one who started it. It wasn’t supposed to go this way at all. But Newton  _ had  _ to go and make some wisecrack about the Wall of Life, which maybe wasn’t entirely his fault, since Hermann had yet to tell him about his father’s recent change in career trajectory, but it was a distasteful joke nonetheless. Hermann is surprised at how easily a few passive-aggressive comments escale into a full-on shouting match, almost as if they’d been doing it their whole lives. Hermann rolls his eyes when Newton finally storms off, and he tries to ignore the pang of disappointment he feels in the following weeks every time he opens his mailbox to find it empty.

 

**Newton is a colleague.**

Although Hermann thinks maybe that word doesn’t quite cover it. Newton is a nuisance, undoubtedly. Hermann has filed numerous formal complaints against the man for violations of personal space, lab safety, cleanliness, and volume level. He is rude, immature, loud, crass, and his proclivity for self-experimentation is surely going to take years off of Hermann’s life due to stress. But he’s also a genius, an outstanding pioneer in his field, a passionate worker, and a  quick-thinker. He’s can also be surprisingly sensitive, compassionate, and insightful. And when jaegers fall and pilots die, he’s the one who seeks Hermann out with a bottle of scotch and puts his arm around his shoulder while they sit in silence and tally up the list of the dead. Despite the line in chalk that divides their labspace, he’s who Hermann sits next to every night at the shatterdome canteen. He’s the only person in the PPDC who always remembers Hermann’s birthday (even if the only way he knows this information is from hacking into his personnel file). So, yes, he’s a colleague, but he also might be a little bit more. 

 

**Newton is a part of him.**

He is prismatic. Kaleidoscopic. Blues, greens, and purples blending and remixing in flashes of light and sensation. He is eight years old, fishing with his uncle. He is reading the entire works of Douglas Adams in a single weekend. He is eavesdropping outside of his school guidance counselor’s office as she tells his father that he is “evidently genius, but shows clear signs of an attention deficit disorder and possible manic tendencies.” He is smugly defending his first of six PhD theses. He is losing his virginity at age seventeen to a man four years his senior and half his IQ. He is watching the news footage of San Francisco being destroyed and already planning his next steps in his head. He is wincing his way through his first tattoo. Hermann isn’t sure of where line between he and Newton begins and ends. Now he is seeing himself from the outside looking in. He is seeing a decade of mutual respect cloaked in fond annoyance. He is seeing the tension that divides but also holds them together. He is seeing the constellations of things they’ve both left unsaid. He is seeing and seeing and seeing and then his vision is blurring and he is stumbling to vomit into a conveniently-placed toilet. 

 

**Newton is a lover.**

For one fleeting night. He is letting his head fall back and groaning as Hermann pushes him up against the wall in the hallway right outside their lab and claiming his mouth in a kiss that had always been in the cards but had taken a decade to finally reach a crescendo. He is kissing Hermann back with the desperation and reckless joy of a man who may have come close to dying at least several times in the past twelve hours. From there it’s a cocked eyebrow as if to ask “So we’re doing this?” and then Newton is taking Hermann’s hand in his own and leading them back to Hermann’s quarters of all places. Everything moves so fast that Hermann barely registers how they make it from the door to the bed but he doesn’t care because then Newton is laughing against his neck as he struggles to kick off his too-tight jeans that Hermann has spent the last ten years attempting not to stare at. Then there are hands on skin and mouths on skin and skin on skin and Newton is all he sees and feels and smells and tastes and it’s almost like the drift all over again, Hermann thinks. It’s fast and fervent and all-consuming, and when they finally break apart they are both breathless and grinning. It’s not long before the full-body exhaustion of the day’s events catches up with them both, and Newton curls up against Hermann and nestles his head into his neck and Hermann wraps one arm around him and as he drifts off to sleep he thinks that maybe deep down this is what he was fighting for all along.

 

**Newton is a stranger.**

Or at least it seems like that’s what he wants to be, Hermann thinks bitterly. After the day the world didn’t end, there are no repeat occurrences of that night they spent together. They don’t discuss it either. In fact, it seems like Newton can’t get away from the PPDC, and from Hermann, fast enough. They have to do some obligatory press appearances and interviews together, of course, but Newton is distant and lost in himself in a way like Hermann has never seen before, despite his many years calling the man a narcissist. Things between them change so quickly and they grow apart so rapidly that when Hermann hears second-hand from Tendo that Newton is taking a job with Shao Industries, he just accepts it as one more in a series of many strange and disappointing changes in Newton lately. Years pass, and he tries not to pay too much attention to phone calls that go unanswered and emails that take weeks to get a reply. Hermann is hurt, but he knows that any efforts to forget or move on from Newton would be futile. So he lets him be a memory. Because even if current Newton is one who wears gaudy suits and works for a soulless corporation and flashes Hermann empty smiles whenever their paths cross, he still has the Newton that’s in his head: the one he saw in the drift. So Hermann lets himself get lost in the past and spends ten years with nothing but memories to keep him warm at night.

 

**Newton is friend in need.**

And Hermann is there for him every step of the way. He curses himself for not recognizing the signs sooner and blames his own insecurities for thinking that the changes between he and Newton were a product of his own shortcomings rather than the effects of mind control by a malevolent alien race. He attempts to atone for his blindness by visiting Newton every single day while he is in PPDC custody; by talking to him and reading to him and holding his hand to comfort him in the brief and rare moments that he is truly himself. Finally, once he has been able to have the necessary PPDC higher-ups approve his plan, he drifts with Newton, routinely, building upon their pre-existing neural connection and chasing the Precursors from his head. And then, slowly but thankfully, Newton is back. But that still isn’t the end of the road. There are military tribunals where Hermann holds Newton’s hand underneath the table as he simultaneously burns every professional bridge he’s ever built in the act of clearing his name. In the end, they are able to get him off with only various counts of criminal negligence and a short sentence of monitored house arrest, which he convinces Newton to spend at his apartment. There are unspoken feelings, which Hermann can sense are mutual, but he realizes that what Newton needs now more than romance is a support system and time to recover. So Hermann accompanies him to his doctors’ appointments and helps keep his name out of the press and makes him tea when he wakes up from nightmares. And if some nights the nightmares are particularly bad and he crawls into Hermann’s bed beside him, Hermann strokes his hair and doesn’t complain.

 

**Newton is a partner.**

In every meaning of the word, at long last. They both still have nightmares from time to time but, more often, there are peaceful nights they spend in each other’s arms. Newton gets private research grants and makes discoveries in botany. They move to a house where Newton can have his own greenhouse where he breeds exotic plants and grows flowers that he gives to Hermann. Hermann goes to work for the space program, now that the threat of the kaiju is eliminated and humanity can turn their eyes back towards the cosmos. They adopt cats and travel and spend entire days in bed making up for lost time. Healing comes easier than either of them expect, and they try to keep their sights set on the future rather than the past. And in the mornings when the rising sun through the window casts golden light on his husband’s sleeping face beside him, Hermann couldn’t be happier with how their story ends.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @newtbiszler


End file.
